Policies and Child Maltreatment: How State Childcare Subsidy Policies Can Promote Positive Parenting Behaviors

Background & Purpose:

 

Childcare subsidies, administered through the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), are a key federal policy support designed to support low-income families in the U.S. A hallmark of CCDF is the large amount of state variation in the ways in which the programs are implemented.  Childcare is an essential part of the lives of many families, and challenges with childcare situations may therefore increase parenting stress and risk for child maltreatment.  Although variation in state policies has potential to influence the family behavior, there is surprisingly little work connecting this variation to variations in low-income families’ experiences.

In this study, we examine how one specific policy characteristic, the percentage of CCDF funds allocated to contracts (rather than certificates or cash benefits), is associated with child physical and verbal abuse. Contracts are issued directly to childcare providers who then apply them to families while certificates and cash benefits are provided to families, who then use the benefits to obtain childcare.

We had two competing hypotheses for this study: (1) Certificates and cash benefits will be associated with lower rates of child maltreatment because of the additional flexibility for parents to find childcare programs that are convenient to their lives (e.g. evening hours or close to home); and on the other hand, (2) Contracts will be associated with lower rates of maltreatment because parents will on average use higher quality care which will, in turn, improve parenting.

 

Methods:

 

We merged administrative data, available through the Administration on Children and Families, with the age 3 wave of the Fragile Families Child and Well-Being Study (FFCW), a longitudinal birth cohort study of 4,898 children in 20 U.S. cities. By design, FFCW oversampled children born to unmarried parents. Our focal predictor, from the administrative data, is the proportion of CCDF funds allocated to contracts. Our focal outcomes are child physical and verbal abuse. We used hierarchical linear modeling to estimate the impact of state-level policies and include a wide range of SES, demographic, and health covariates.

 

Results:

Our findings show that, in states that allocate a higher proportion of CCDF funds to contracts, FFCW mothers report lower levels of child physical and verbal abuse (though the effect is marginal (p<.10) for verbal abuse.  We had provided two competing hypotheses for this study, and the findings provided support for the second hypothesis.

Conclusions & Implications:

 

The findings suggest that by government having a greater ability to select their preferred providers with contract, parenting behaviors are improved.  This may be driven, in part, by government -selected childcare providers being higher quality, on average, and these higher quality providers are protective against maltreatment.  Next steps for this study include examining the mediators of the relationship between the state policies and child maltreatment.